On Ultimate Off Ultimate

[Nestama]

There's multiple battle design teams in FFXIV. For example, the team who made Ultimate Coils of Bahamut did not work on Ultima Weapon Ultimate (at least, I'm pretty sure this was confirmed).

[Remedi]

Yes they had 2 different guys at the helm, also patch teams is not expansion team. Usually MMOs have an expansion in development the moment the last one hit release

[Rockette]

Hey OP. I take it you've come from the Reddit discussion where raiders are disappointed with this announcement.

Despite the calls of "we need to take it to the official forums so we are heard", I knew exactly what would happen if the same discussion was attempted here.

The community here aren't raiders. It's pretty much as simple as that. No one who frequents these forums are going to back us up on this because no on here does Ultimate. Everyone who is a raider and has been for some time are either a) all banned from the forums or b) they don't visit here. And why would they? You can't ask for help on rotations or dps discussions because people here are anti parser as well.

I support you and I wish this thread had gone better like the discussions do on Reddit but it won't.

Sad days for the raid/twitch community who really put their all into Ultimate.

[Dualgunner]

Hey I take offense to that Rockette. I have a lot of fun from forum salt is why I hang around here. :P

[Bourne_Endeavor]

...does it matter? How many raiders have even beaten the first one, if not both?

Does Perform matter? Just because you don't enjoy a specific piece of content doesn't mean everyone shares your opinion. Plenty of people prog Ultimate even if they are miles away from clearing because it's a long-term goal. Certainly a better alternative to doing... what exactly? Ridorana and Swallow's Compass.

You should be worried they are going to break all the third party stuff due to ultimate raiders. Hopefully it wont be all content.

They're talking about Cactbot, which is a different tool than ACT. They aren't going to touch parsers because they know the backlash it would have.

Less than 7000, out of at least 2 million players. Do the math.

You weren't watching day one then. Xeno and MrHappy both broke 10k and maintained for several days, albeit with dips through the day. Both continued to average 4-5k, and have only dropped now that Ultimate's been cleared.

they also worry about player's health - when they hear stories of 21 hour/day prog and forgoing sleep to down these things that makes them rethink how many these they should put out.

Leith was meme-ing. Entropy progged roughly 12-14 hours until the last day when they were close to clearing. That's when they pulled 21 hours. That's hardly a health concern, especially it only happens once in eight months.

Sfia even went into some details on Frosty's podcast. They set up meal plans, purposely eat properly and get enough sleep to keep themselves focused. They're probably more health conscious than the majority of people whining over how "unhealthy" WF prog is.

Still, 21 hours one single day is not healthy. As far I know the norm was around more than 12 and less than 16 per day, so not that big of a difference.

Staying up playing a game for 21 hours every eight months isn't going to kill you anymore than going out on Years News Eve and getting hammered would. Are we going to worry about the health of party-goers now too?

Also makes up most of the player base. I don't think people wanting content like Ultimate do themselves any favours hating on the bulk of the player base

Many raiders become frustrated because the overwhelming majority of content is made for casual players. You already get virtually everything. Even Savage was watered down to better cater towards lower skilled players. Alas, that still isn't enough. People whine about Neo Exdeath and God Kefka being Savage exclusive. And they whine over Ultimate because how dare the raid community has one piece of content designed for them.

And if we're going to use the whole "well, not many people do it!" argument. PvP has been a near failure since its inception yet that hasn't stopped the devs from pouring huge amounts of resources into it; practically begging people to play.

snip

I haven't been banned yet. ;-;

[RiyahArp]

Does Perform matter? Just because you don't enjoy a specific piece of content doesn't mean everyone shares your opinion. Plenty of people prog Ultimate even if they are miles away from clearing because it's a long-term goal. Certainly a better alternative to doing... what exactly? Ridorana and Swallow's Compass.

1. Does it matter we do not have a third ultimate fight when barely anyone has beaten the first two? Is there a large audience that is really going to be hurt by the lack of this third fight specifically. It's not "get rid of ultimate" it's "how many ultimate fights can this playerbase complete or gain value from?"

2. No, perform doesn't matter. I rarely even see it used any more in town areas. I don't think devs get that if you have musical talent, you are probably going to choose a real instrument over this, and the main benefit of music systems are non-musical people who can use macros of popular songs.

3. If they obfuscate the data sent to the server, it can affect anything that relies on that data and maybe break it. All that stuff more or less works on the same principle.

[Paladinleeds]

I don't do Ultimate Raids. I can't even beat Savage 3 and 4, but in my eyes, the content needs to be tuned up. Make it Coil Savage level difficult throughout Savage. Make story mode current Savage 1-2 difficulty. Swap the ilvls of unaugmented tome gear and normal mode raid gear. They should be adding more difficult content. More consistent difficulties would be good. Casual raiders get normal mode, midcore raiders get Savage, and hardcore blasts through it all to Ultimate. That would mean I'm only good enough for normal mode (if that), but then again, if I want to progress further, I should just git gud. Simple as.

So yes, I would advocate for the 3rd Ultimate in an expansion because of how it ties in to the difficulty model I suggested above.

[Lambdafish]

snip

I agree with everything said here. What I would love the devs to do is pour those missing resources back into raid content. I'd love it if we got the next Omega tier which didn't end with Omega himself, and then in 4.5 we get the Omega "trial" which is nowhere near on par with Ultimate, but difficulty wise would pretty much be a pseudo 5th tier to the raid (and would require completion of the raid). I feel like this would fill the hole that ultimate would leave, while also addressing the problems with having too many ultimate fights in an expansion.

INB4 people are triggered that I ask for more raid content.

[Cetonis]

The most optimistic way to put this is that they want to give groups who raid on lighter schedules, or who started partway through 4.x, ample time to clear both Ultimates before 5.0 when who-knows-what is going to happen to the 4.x ones. Then they'll have two again in 5.x and so on. (On that point, they definitely did not say they were doing away with Ultimate, just that three per expac might be too many)

Perhaps they feel like the main reason for the low clear rates isn't difficulty, but time commitment, in which case you'd want to see if there's an increase in clears during the expansion lull if the 2-3 night a week groups get enough time to put the 150-200 hours into each fight, which one might expect to be the high end of how long it might take a sufficiently skilled group to clear.


The elephant in the room is the massive gap between Savage and Ultimate though. It would have been fine if they gradually notched up Savage difficulties as originally planned, but instead we have a content layout where you have what used to be a "harder EX trial" level of difficulty, and the only next step up from that is Ultimate.

If SE wants to see more groups give it a try, decide to put in the time to clear now that they'll clearly have a ton of it, how on earth is a group of post-Midas raiders supposed to do that? Maybe they are planning some sort of in-between challenge fight for 4.5 instead, one not worthy of the Ultimate label but tougher than Savage...

Either way, they need to start working on this problem. The answer to low Ultimate participation isn't to stop making Ultimate forever, it's to give the newly grown batch of Savage raiders the stepping stones they need to make Ultimate approachable. And that may also include limiting to two Ultimates per expac. Until the 4.5x lull hits, we won't really know what the end result is going to be.

[polyhedral]

You weren't watching day one then. Xeno and MrHappy both broke 10k and maintained for several days, albeit with dips through the day. Both continued to average 4-5k, and have only dropped now that Ultimate's been cleared.

I watched enough the first few days to know that I personally never seen this, but then again, I personally grow tired of seeing folks fight the same fight days, weeks, and months on end. I low balled both numbers and tried to play devil's advocate, but since you brought it up, don't you think this game has more than 2 million active subs throughout the world? My point still stands I think.

I know some would like to see this game turn into an e-sports game, hell, it would make them money if that was so, but I cringe at that thought.

Like I said in an earlier comment ITT, I'd grab my pitchfork right along with ya, if I had seen even 50k people interested in watching those few folks fighting UwU.